Besides Screencastify, imovie or perhaps Movavi (depending on whether your school uses Chromebooks or Ipads), the most integral component of our plan to give students the option of Vlogging their work is by using VideoAnt. VideoAnt is an online platform which can be used to post and annotate videos. The annotation can be done by a teacher, the student who posted the video, or even a peer. The uses of VideoAnt are fairly endless, as it can be used by students to vlog their work, using annotations to add insight or as a form of goal setting and self assessment. It can also be used by the teacher when having students (individually or as a class) annotate videos for a given purpose. This could even be an effective exercise to teach students how to use it!
As part of my personal inquiry earlier in the year, I focused on student choice within the content, process, or product of an assignment. When Student’s are allowed a degree of choice within one of those domains, the opportunity for higher levels of engagement is possible due to their feeling a better sense of ownership over their learning. VideoAnt is an awesome tool to allow for choice within the process or product of student work, as it can be used for a final presentation, or even just as a vlog of the process of creating such work. What’s great about using VideoAnt as a presentation tool, is that for those students who suffer from high levels of anxiety when it comes to being up in front of the classroom, it could be submitted as a recorded presentation with the annotations to give the teacher a better understanding of their work and process.
How does VideoAnt work? It can be used by uploading from a personal YouTube channel or a video file from your personal computer. In regard to privacy, if students create YouTube channels for their work they should be set to ‘private’ so that they remain personal. On the VideoAnt website itself, The teacher would have to create a private group with all the students, again to keep the videos only for classroom purposes. Using an application like this would require consent from parents, as well as most likely the school/district admin as the data is stored in the US (as far as we can tell). That being said, it’s a great tool to use for teachers hoping to tap into their student’s interests!
Adrian, Riley & Ari
